Parenting is Hard. Thank God for That.
What Athletes, Ascetics, and Parents Share in Common
“It’s a 2,000 meter race and I remember not being able to feel my legs, starting to black out, and having to concentrate on not blacking out from exhaustion. And the air going down my esophagus was on fire, tasted like blood and metal in your throat. And that was at 800 meters.”
That’s how Scott Galloway described rowing crew at UCLA. The moral of the story is that when you think you can’t go any further, you’re at about a third of your capacity. This is all part of his mythos, including his first job at Goldman Sachs where he made a name for himself by working straight through every Tuesday morning to Wednesday night.
Galloway is the heroin of hustle content.
When these stories are about athletes or entrepreneurs, they are praised as examples of American grit. But that praise doesn’t extend to parents pushing themselves.
This came into focus for me listening to Catherine Pakaluk, the author of Hannah’s Children, interview Marcella Burke, who owns her own law practice in Houston and at the time was expecting her fifth. Burke said she was inspired by Justice Antonin Scalia who once quipped, “If you think I’m ambitious, you should meet my wife.” Scalia’s wife raised 9 kids. He just wrote opinions.
Burke was taken with this idea of a “noble ambition,” so she made it a rule: any time she was preparing for a major career advance—clerkship, fellowship, partnership, etc.—she would actively try to have a kid. As a result, she says, “I’ve basically been pregnant for the entire 15 years we’ve been married. And we have four boys now, but I’ve had seven miscarriages.” She also earned equity partnership at a top firm, served in the EPA, and founded her own firm in Houston. As Pakaluk joked, she seems to have lived three lifetimes already.
The idea of being ambitious for children can sound odd. Maybe it conjures up a poorly kept house and an overwhelmed mom. Maybe it seems improper, treating our kids like championship rings we use to taunt our neighbors. It’s one thing to overtrain for crew or overinvest in our business, but you can’t scale back a child. The dangers of too much ambition seem far greater than those of too little.
In practice though, the hesitation is usually for the opposite reason. It’s not that people think parenting is so important that it should only be reserved for perfect conditions. It’s that they don’t think it’s important at all.
In Hannah’s Children, one mom recalls how in medical school, her sacrifice of time and energy was widely respected, yet when she sacrificed her time and energy to have 7 kids, the response was, “Well, you asked for it.” When I interviewed Pakaluk a couple years ago, she spoke to this dynamic:
We don’t think having children is valuable or worthwhile . . . We don’t value medicine and bootcamp and the military—these other all-encompassing professions—we don’t value them because they’re costly or because they’re hard. There’s all kinds of things that are hard to do that we don’t value . . . To say something completely absurd for a minute, try to live a functional life as an alcoholic. It’s actually very difficult. There’s an intense level of willingness to suffer . . . but we don’t value living as an alcoholic. I don’t want to make light of an addiction, but I’m drawing it out.
We have no difficulty separating out costs that people willingly take on to do something foolish . . . from the inherent value of the thing. The question is why we don’t value children and childbearing. They are as hard as medicine and the military and climbing a high mountain, but we don’t see them as worth doing.
Children bring some unavoidable struggles. Newborns don’t sleep through the night. 2-year-olds don’t listen. But if you believe that raising children is worthwhile, then that suffering is the suffering of an athlete or soldier, not the suffering of an alcoholic. And more than that, those moments offer value just like the training session of an athlete.
In his book Enduring Love, Father Josiah Trenham upends the common approach to parenthood:
Contraception is called “protection” as though children are dangerous monsters that husbands and wives need to be protected from. On the contrary, parents don’t need to be saved from children: parents need to be saved by children. The bearing and rearing of children is the narrow path through which those called by God to marriage work out their own salvation with fear and trembling. The real monsters from which the couple needs protection are not their future children, but their egos, self-centeredness, and self-love.
There is a shared discipline between the athlete, the ascetic, and the parent. In fact, St. John Chrysostom exhorts parents to “please God by rearing such athletes for Him, that we and our children may light on the blessings that are promised to them that love Him.”
And as any athlete knows, your best performance always requires others. When Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile, he had runners alongside him the whole time. For the crucial final lap, one runner stayed behind all race to make sure he paced Bannister down the home stretch. With that accountability, Bannister set a personal and world record.
In the same way, every parent knows the feeling of children pushing us to our limit. There are bestsellers all about it:
And while it’s not good to lose your temper, just like it’s not good to black out during a 2,000 meter race, the idea that you should live in total equanimity doesn’t make sense either. What rower would advise you to never train above 50% of your capacity? Likewise, if your children are part of your path toward humility, then you wouldn’t expect that to mean a smooth ride.
Metropolitan Anthony Bloom in Learning to Pray tells a surprising story of how a saint was freed from his anger:
When in our prayers, we ask God to give us strength to do something in His Name, we are not asking Him to do it instead of us because we are too feeble to be willing to do it for ourselves.
The lives of the saints are enlightening in this respect, and in the life of St Philip Neri just such an occasion is described. He was an irascible man who quarreled easily and had violent outbursts of anger and of course endured violent outbursts from his brothers. One day he felt that it could not go on. Whether it was virtue or whether he could no longer endure his brothers his Vita does not tell us. The fact is that he ran to the chapel, fell down before a statue of Christ and begged Him to free him of his anger. He then walked out full of hope. The first person he met was one of the brothers who had never aroused the slightest anger in him, but for the first time in his life this brother was offensive and unpleasant to him. So Philip burst out with anger and went on, full of rage, to meet another of his brothers, who had always been a source of consolation and happiness to him. Yet even this man answered him gruffly. So Philip ran back to the chapel, cast himself before the statue of Christ and said, “O Lord, have I not asked you to free me from this anger?” And the Lord answered, “Yes, Philip, and for this reason I am multiplying the occasions for you to learn.”
The common view of parenthood is that of the utilitarian. Weigh up the negatives (poor sleep, interrupted conversations, screaming on airplanes), weigh up the positives (cute photos, sense of meaning, fulfilling biological imperative), and then see which side comes out ahead.
But if you come to accept that the difficulties are God giving you “occasions to learn” and the good times are blessings, then you can find the whole experience far less pointless and far more meaningful. Just like in the gym you need to push until failure to make strength gains, I like to think of it as Progressive Overload Parenting. You need to push past your perceived limits time after time.
The next time you’re feeling overwhelmed, I give you full permission to reframe your life in Scott Galloway’s terms. It can make your life feel as epic and important as it already is. Here are some samples I came up with:
“It’s 2 in the morning, and I remember not being able to feel my legs, wanting to fall back asleep and having to concentrate on not falling back asleep. And the air wafting into my mouth was on fire, tasted like vomit and diarrhea in your throat. And that was at diaper one.”
OR
“It’s 10:15 at church, and I remember being able to feel my blood pressure rising, starting to see red, and having to concentrate on not seeing red. And the breath coming out of my mouth was on fire, tasted like blood and metal coming out of your throat. I was breathing fire like a literal dragon in the middle of this liturgy. And that was 15 minutes after we arrived.”
Feel free to leave your Scott Galloway parenting wins in the comments below. God bless you in all the occasions He gives you to learn.